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Eighty-Seven. ^ 



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BY MISS JENNIE M. BINGHAM. 



NEW YORK: 
PHILLIPS & HUNT 

CINCI>fNATl: 
WALDEN & STOWE. 



?S. 



i^MS^IifSMilS^Mia^iS^ 



The "Home Collkge Series" will contain one hundred short papers on 
a wide range of subjecls — biographical, Listoricol, scientific, literary, domes- 
tie, political, and religious. Indeed, the religious tone will characterize all' 
of them. The}' are written for every hoc\y — for all wiiose leisure is limited, 
but who desire louse the niiuutes for the enrichment of life. 

These papers contain seeds from the best gardens in all the world of 
human knowledge, and if dropped wisely into gooil soil, wi'l bring forth 
harvests of beauty and value. 

They are for ihe young — especially for young people (and older people, 
too) who are out of the schools, who are full of " business" and "cares," 
who are in danger of reading nothing, or of reading a sensa.ional literature 
\bat is worse than nothing. 

One of these papers a week read over and over, thought and talked about 
at "odd times," will give in one year a vast fund of information, an intel- 
lectual quickening, worth even more than the mere knowledge acquired, a 
taste for solM read ng, many hours of simple and wholefome pleasure, and 
ability to talk intelligently and helpfull}-- to one's friends. 

Pastors m;ty organize "Home College" classes, or "Lyceum Reading 
Unions," or "Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circles," and help the 
young people to read and think and talk and live to worthier purpose. 

A young man may have his own little "college" all by himself, read this 
si^ries of tracts one after the other, (there will soon be one hundred of them 
readv.) e.xamine himself on them b}' the " Thought-Outline to Help the Mem- 
ory." and thus gain knowledge, and, what is better, a love of knowledge. 

And what a voung man may do in this respect, a young woman, and both 

old men and old women, may do. 

J. H. Vincent. 

New York, Jan., 18&3. 



Copyrijflit, 1863, by Puillips &, Hunt, Now York. 



Pomf Cotlfgf Sfrtts. |Jumbtr €igbtit-stben. 



CHARLES LAMB. 



Charles Lamb was a Londoner. He loved London with 
a passion, as Wordsworth loved the lakes. He wrote to 
Wordsworth : " Separate from the pleasure of your com- 
pany, I don't care if I never see a mountain in my life. I 
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as 
many and intense local attachments as any of your mount- 
aineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops 
uf the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, 
tradesmen, and customers ; all the bustle and wickedness 
round about Covent Garden ; the watchmen, drunken scenes, 

I rattles ; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night ; 
the impossibility of being dull ; the crowds ; the very dirt 

I and mud ; the sun, shining upon houses and pavements ; the 
old book-stalls, coffee-houses, steams of soup from kitchens, 

, the pantomimes — London itself a pantomime and a mas- 
querade — all these things work themselves into my mind and 
feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of 
these sights impels me into night- walks about her crowded 
streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from 
fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be 
strange ; so are your rural emotions to me." 

He was born on the 10th of February, 1775, in the Crown 
Office Row of the Inner Temple. Thus he writes of the 
Temple : "Indeed it is the most elegant spot in the metrop- 
olis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London 
for the first time — passing from the crowded Strand or 
Fleet Street by unexpected avenues into its magnificent 
ample squares, its classic green recesses ! A man would 
have given something to have been born in such places." 
When seven years old he was presented to the school of 



CHARLES LAMB. 



Christ's College by the governor as " the son of John Lamh. 
scrivener, and Elizabeth, his wife," where he remained until 
his fifteenth year. While the great city still roared around 
there were two lads in that school destined to paths in life 
how different, yet to be linked together by friendship, until 
Lamb's death, in 1834, separated them. One of them has in 
grand words immortalized by a graphic touch the other : 
'* Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day- 
spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before 
thee, the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge, logician — metaphysician — bard ! How have I seen 
the casual passers through the cloisters stand still entranced 
with admiration to hear thee unfold in thy deep and sweet 
intonations the mysteries of Plotinus, or reciting Homer in 
his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Gray Friars 
re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy ! " 

One of Lamb's school-fellows, of whom he has made 
affectionate mention in his essay, " Recollections of Christ's 
Hospital," has supplied some particulars of his school 
days: "He was an amiable, gentle boy, very sensible and 
keenly observing, indulged by his school-fellows and master 
on account of his infirmity of speech. His countenance 
was mild, his complexion clear brown, with an expression 
which might lead you to think that he was of Jewish de- 
scent. His walk was slow and peculiar, adding to the 
staid appearance of his figure. I never heard his name 
mentioned without the addition of Charles, although there 
was no other boy of that name in the school. While others 
were all for play he stole along with all the self-concentra- 
tion of a young monk. His delicate frame and difticulty of 
utterance, which was increased by agitation, unfitted him for 
joining in any boisterous sport." 

His parents still resided in the Inner Temple, so that 
Charles passed from the cloister of school to the cloister of 
home without change. Here he had access to the library 



CHARLES LAMB. 



of Mr, Salt, to whose memory his pen has given immor- 
tality in his essay, "The Old Benches of the Inner Temple." 
Here he " was tumbled into a spacious closet of good old 
English reading, where he browsed at will upon that fair 
and wholesome pasturage." He applied these words to 
liis sister, but there is no doubt they "browsed" together; 
they had walked hand in hand from a time extending 
beyond the period of their memory. Speaking of the 
kind of education, in one of his essays, he says : " Had 
I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this 
fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might 
not be diminished by it, but I can answer for it, that it 
makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable 
old maids." For this sister, ten years older than himself, he 
cherished an affection as beautiful and unselfish as this world 
ever saw. There was also an older brother described by 
Elia in the essay, " My Relations'," who fulfilled to the last 
Charles's affectionate injunction, " to keep the elder brother 
up in state." 

Mary Lamb has been described by those who knew her as 
a woman of uncommonly good sense, with the delicate 
humor and rare sort of culture which her brother had. She 
was a very precious and most congenial companion to him ; 
he called her his "prop," his "ever-present and inalienable 
friend ;" he looked to her for counsel, saying, "she is older 
and wiser and better than me ; " and during those times of 
temporary separation he was lost without her : " One does 
not make a household,''^ he wrote, "and I am in despair." 
Though his life was never free from anxiety, the two had a 
vast deal of comfort together. "Charles Lamb would be j* 
lovable," says one, " if for no other reason because of that 
loving heart of his for her, and tender solicitude for her all 
his days. It is so sweet that we almost forget the pain that 
went with it. We can overlook his faults, too — how small 
they seem in the light of his good-will to men, his charity, 



CHARLES LAMB. 



his gentle humanities, and, above all, his filial and brotherly 
devotion !" "O, my friend," lie wrote to Coleridge, "cul- 
tivate the filial feelings ! and let no man think himself re- 
leased from the kind charities of relationship ; these shall 
give him peace at the last." 

The students of Christ's Hospital were expected to enter 
the Church, but Lamb was so unfitted by nature for the 
clerical profession that he left school to pursue the uncon- 
genial labor of the "desk's dull wood." To this hard lot he 
submitted with cheerfulness, and saw his school-fellows de- 
part for the university, toward which he longingly looked, 
without a murmur. At first he was employed in the South 
Sea House under his brother John; but in 1792 he obtained 
an appointment in the accountant's office of the East India 
Company. His slender salary and little leisure were freely 
bestowed on his aged parents and sister. His recreations 
were confined to walks with Mary and an occasional supper 
with his school-fellows. One time his friends, being amused 
with the particularly large and flapping brim of his hat, 
pinned it up on the sides in the form of a cocked hat. Lamb 
made no alteration, but walked home in his usual sauntering 
gait. As he was going down Ludgate Hill some gay young 
men caught sight of him, exclaiming, "The A^eritable Guy !" 
and with this exclamation took liim up, making a chair with 
their arms, carried him to a post of St. Paul's Church-yard, 
and left him there. He wore his three-cornered hat many 
evenings, and retained the name of "Guy" ever after. 

When Coleridge came to London, Lamb became his ad- 
miring disciple. They used to sup together at a little inn, 
remaining long after they had heard the chimes at midnight. 
Years afterward Lamb wrote to Coleridge : " I imagine to 
myself the little smoky room at the " Salutation and Cat," 
where we have sat together through the winter nights be- 
guiling the cares of life with poesy — when life was fresh 
and topics exhaustless, and you first kindled in me, if not 



CHARLES LAMB. 



the power, yet the love, of poetry and beauty and kind- 
liness." 

Lamb had no sympathy with tlie radiant philosophy and 
wild sugii;estions of Coleridge. Talfourd says : " lie clung 
to the realities of life ; to things nearest to him which the 
force of habit had made dear. The tendency of his mind 
to detect the beautiful and good in surrounding things, to 
nestle rather than to roam, was cherished by all the circum- 
stances of his boyish days." He replied to a letter from 
Coleridge : " In my poor mind 'tis best for us to consider 
God as our Heavenly Father and our best friend, without 
indulging too bold conceptions of his nature. Let us rejoice 
in the name of ' dear children ' and ' brethren,' seeking to 
know no further." 

About these days he was wandering over Islington fields 
M'ith one Anna, " a fair-haired maid," of whom we hear very 
little ; but there are two or three sweet sonnets addressed 
rather to a memory than to her. He was looking forward 
to promotion in the India House, and to the pleasant sweet- 
ness of coming times. " Islington," he writes to Coleridge, 
" possibly you would not like. To me, 'tis classical gTOund." 

But in 1V96 the whole current of his life was changed. 
His sister, in a lit of insanity, seized a knife and killed their 
mother. The father was an infirm invalid, and the way in 
which Charles now rose to the greatness of the trial was as 
sublime as is the record of his feelings. He wrote : " My 
poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious in- 
strument of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is 
restored to her senses. For Mary I can answer, but I hope 
/ shall never have less recollection of what has happened 
than I have now. It is not a light thing, nor meant by the 
Almighty to be received lightly. I must be serious, circum- 
spect, and deeply religious through life ; and by such means 
may both of us escape madness in future, if it so please the 
Almighty." The he turned forever away from Islington 



CHARLES LAMB. 



and dreams of the future. "I am wedded to the fortunes 
of ray sister and my poor old father," he says. 

In his essay, "Tlie Old Benches of the Inner Temple," he 
writes of his father's old age : "At intervals he would speak 
of his former life, and how he came up from Lincoln to go 
to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, 
and how he returned after some years' absence and she 
blessed herself at the change, and could hardly be brought 
to believe that it was her o^n bairn. And then the excite- 
ment subsiding, he would weep till I have wished that sad 
gecond childhood miglit have a mother still to lay its head 
upon her lap. But the common mother of us all, in no long 
time after, received him gently into hers." 

While his father lived the sister wms kept at an asylum. 
Even then the elder brother objected to her removal, and 
there was danger lest the parish authorities might place her 
life at the disposal of the crown. But Charles came to her 
deliverance ; he satisfied all parties by a solemn engagement 
that he would take her under his care for life, and he faith- 
fully kept his word. She left the asylum, aud took up her 
abode with her brother. 

With the slender income of a hundred pounds they two 
set forth together on their life journey, doubly endeared to 
each other by the strange calamity which had befallen them. 
He wrote to Colei-idge: " With me the former things have 
passed away, and I have something more to do than to feel. 
I am recovering — God be prasied for it ! — a healthiness of 
mind something like calmness ; but I want more religion — I 
am jealous of human helps and leaning-places. It is a great 
object Avith me to live near town, and to quit a neighbor- 
hood where poor Mary's disorder, so frequently recurring, 
has made us a sort of marked people : we can be nowhere 
private except in the midst of London." 

He speaks of a visit paid to Oxford ])articularly gratifying 
to him, but he says : " It was to a family where I could not 



i^- 



CHARLES LAMB. 



take M;iry with me ; and I am afraid there is something of 
dishonesty in any pleasure I take without her." When the 
holidays came round and they ventured forth for a little 
journey, Miss Lamb carefully packed a straight waistcoat 
in their trunk ; it was their constant companion. As the 
symptoms made themselves known by restlessness and in- 
ability to sleep, she gently prepared her bx'other for the 
terrible duty he had to perform. Unless he could stave oflE 
the separation until Sunday, he was obliged to ask leave of 
absence as if for a day's pleasure, some quaint or witty pre- 
tense hiding the bleeding heart. On one occasion Mr. Lloyd, 
a well-beloved friend, met them slowly pacing together a 
little foot-path, both weeping bitterly. When he joined them 
he found they were taking their solemn way to the accus- 
tomed asylum. 

Mary Lamb shared not only the gentle nature of her 
brother, but also his literary talent. She wrote a charming 
little book, entitled "Miss Leicester's School," and with her 
brother, wrote those " Stories from Shakespeare " which 
have never lost their popularity. 

In 1798 Lamb and Llyod brought out a joint volume of 
blank verse, which was honored by a brief and scornful 
notice in "The Monthly Review." Tlie same year Lamb 
composed his prose tale, "Rosamond Gray," which sold 
better than his poems. Talfourd says : " In this tale nothing 
is made out with distinctness except the rustic piety and 
grace of the lovely girl and her venerable grandmother, 
which are pictured with such earnestness and simplicity as 
might beseem a fragment of the Book of Ruth. The refle?,- 
tion he makes on the eulogistic character of tomb-stone 
inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood i for, when a 
very little boy, walking with his sister in a church-yard, he 
suddenly asked her, "Mary, where do the naughty people 
lie ? " 

About this time he met Southey, with whom he carried 



CHARLES LAMB. 



on a brisk correspondence. He thus quaintly criticises a 
poem in Southey's collection : " ' The Rose ' is the only in- 
sipid thing in the volume. It has neither thorns nor 
sweetness ; " and adds, " I think you are too apt to conclude 
faintly with some eold moral. This is to convert religion 
into mediocre feelings, which should burn and glow and 
tremble. A moral should be wrought into the body and 
soul of a poem, not tagged to the end, like a ' God send 
the good ship into the harbor,' at the conclusion of our bills 
of lading." 

Lamb's next effort was a tradegy, " John Woodvil," which 
the reviewers passed over with a contemptuous twitter. It 
did not succeed on the stage, but is now acknowledged to 
have merit. 

The establishment of the " London Magazine " occasioned 
Lamb's introduction to the public by the name " Elia," under 
which he acquired his brilliant reputation. The adoption 
of this signature w^as purely accidental. His first contri- 
bution to the magazine was a description of the Old South 
Sea House, where he had passed a few months' novitiate 
as a clerk thirty years before, and of its inmates, who had 
long since passed away. Remembering the name of a gay, 
light-hearted foreigner who fluttered there at that time, he 
subscribed his name to the essay. It was afterward affixed 
to subsequent contributions ; and Lamb used it until, in his 
" Last Essays of Elia," he bade it a sad farewell. 

Talfourd give us this pen picture of Lamb : " Methinks 
I see him before me now as he appeared during the twenty 
years of our intimacy. A light frame, so fragile tnat it 
seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like 
black, was surmounted by a form of head and expi-ession the 
most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about 
an expanded forehead ; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with 
varying expression, though the prevalent feeling was sad ; 
and the nose slightly curved, with the lower outline of the 



CHARLES LAMB. 9 



face regularly oval, completed a head which was finely 
placed on the shoulders, and gave importance and even dig- 
nity to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe 
his countenance — catch its quivering sweetness — and fix it 
forever in words ? TJiere are none, alas ! to answer the 
vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with hu- 
mor ; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth ; and 
a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the mind, 
it can as little describe as lose. His personal appearance 
and manner are not unfitly characterized by what he himself 
says of a friend : ' a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, 
and the angel." 

Some one has said that "humor is the literature of 
tears." True it is that Charles Lamb, with his burdened, 
blighted life, was the prince of humorists. There are no 
letters in our language which so overflow with the keen- 
est and richest fun as those which Lamb wrote to his friends. 
He thus lamented the abolition of the custom of observingr 
saints' days in public oftices : " Red-letter days — now become 
to all intents and purposes dead-letter days. There was Paul 
and Stephen and Barnabas, Andrew and John, men famous 
in old time — we were used to keep all their days holy, as 
long back as I was at school at Christ's. I honored them 
all, and could almost have' wept the defalcation of Iscariot, 
so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred ; only 
methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better 
Jude with Simon — clubbing, as it were, their sanctities to- 
gether, to make one poor gaudy day between them — as an 
economy unworthy of the dispensation." He loved old books, 
and used fairly to haunt the book-stalls. In one of his let- 
ters he writes about owning books : "It is pleasanter to eat 
one's own peas out of one's own garden than to buy them 
by the peck at Covent Garden ; and a book reads the 
better which is our own, and has been so long known to 
us that we know the topography of its blots and dog-ears, 



10 CHARLES LAMB. 



and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea 
with ])uttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the 
maximum." 

Following is an extract from one of his letters after an 
experience of moving : " We are moved, and shall be here 
until the end of May, when we move to No. 4 Inner Temple 
Lane, where I mean to live and die ; for I have such horror 
of moving that I would not take a benefice from the king if 
I was not indulged with non-residence. What a dislocation 
of comfort is comprised in that word moving! Such a heap 
of little nasty things after you think all is got into the cart : 
old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, vials, things it is 
impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but 
which the women, who preside on these occasions, will not 
leave behind if it was to save your soul. They would keep 
the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken 
matches, to show their economy ! Then you can find noth- 
ing you want for many days after you get into your new 
lodging. You must comb your hair with 3^our fingers, wash 
your hands without soap, and go about in dirty gaiters. Our 
place of final destination — I don't mean the grave, but No. 4 
Inner Temple Lane^looks out upon a gloomy church-yard- 
like court." 

After removing to the Temple he wrote : " Here I hope to 
set up my rest, and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, 
gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodg- 
ing. He lets lodging for single gentlemen. Hazlitt has 
since finished his life; I do not mean his own life, but the 
' Life of Holcroft,' which is going to j^ress. Tuthill is Dr. 
Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little 
book for children on ' Titles of Honor ; ' and, to give them 
some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising, 
I have made a little scale, supposing myself to receive the 
following various accessions of dignity from the king, who 
is the fountain of honor. As at first : 1. Mr. C. Lamb ; 



CHARLES LAMB. 11 



2. C. Lamb, Esq. ; 3. Sir C. Lamb, Bart. ; 4. Baron Lamb, 
of Stamford ; 5. Viscount Lamb ; 6. Earl Lamb ; 7. Marquis 
Lamb ; 8. Duke Lamb. I have sometimes in my dreams 
imagined myself still advancing as, 9. King Lamb; 10. Em- 
peror Lamb ; 11. Pope Innocent Lamb, higher than which 
is nothing. The Persian Embassador is the principal thing 
talked of now. His name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common 
people call him Shaw Nonsense." 

Thus he writes about his numerous visitors : " I am sat- 
urated with human faces and voices all the golden morning. 
I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co." When Coleridge 
began lecturing, Lamb wrote to Miss Wordsworth : "I mean 
to hear some of the course ; but lectures are not much to 
my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are 
dismal flat; and you can't think why you are brought to- 
gether to hear a man read his works which you could read 
so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, 
I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should sud- 
denly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner 
given in honor of me at the London Tavern. ' Gentlemen,' 
said I, and then I stopped ; the rest my feelings were under 
the necessity of supplying." 

In answer to a friend who was traveling, and had sent 
them gilts, he says, " Your /yreseufs make amends for ab- 
sencey A constable in Salisbury Cathedral was telling him 
that eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathe- 
dral, upon which he remarked, that " they must be very 
sharp set." He wrote to Ilazlitt that he had rented a room 
to use between five and eight at night, to avoid his nocturnal, 
alias knock-eternal, visitors. 

When recovering from a severe sickness he wrote : " We 
sleep three in a bed here ; my bed-fellows are cough and 
cramp." 

He uttered his protest agninst paying literary duties in 
this way : " This custom-and-duty age," he says, " would 



13 CHARLES LAMB. 



have made the preacher on the Mount take out a license, and 
St. Paul's epistles not niissible without a stamp ! " 

A proposal to erect a memorial to Clarkson upon the spot 
by the way-side where he formed the great resolution of de- 
voting his life to the abolition of the slave-trade, produced 
from Lamb the following letter : *' 1 return your list with 
my name, I should be sorry that any respect should be 
going on toward Clarkson and I be left out of the conspir- 
acy. Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarize a man's good 
feelings in his life-time is not to my taste. The vanities of 
life — art, poetry, military skill — are subjects for trophies, 
not the silent thoughts arising iti a good man's mind in 
lonely places. Was I Clarkson I should never be able to 
walk or ride near the spot again. Instead of bread we are 
giving him a stone. Instead of a locality recalling the 
noblest moment of his existence, it is a place at which his 
friends blow to the world, ' What a good man is he ! ' I sat 
down upon a hillock at Forty Hill yesternight, (a fine con- 
templative evening,) with a thousand good speculations 
about mankind. How I yearned with cheap benevolence ! 
I shall go and inquire of the stone-cutter that cuts the tomb- 
stones here, what a stone with a short inscription will cost^ 
just to say, 'Here C. Lamb loved his brethren of mankind.'" 

There were times, especially during his sister's absence, 
when his sorrows overwhelmed him, when, as he says, "his 
day went into twilight, and he didn't think it worth the ex- 
pense of candles." Sometimes, it must be confessed, he 
would yield to the influence of intoxicating liquors ; very 
often he resorted to his pipe, which, he says, " is like not 
being at home to a dun. It comes with tenfold bitterness 
next day." 

An anecdote is told of Charles Lamb's stuttering, that on 
one occasion, being weakened and ill from overwork, he was 
recommended b)'^ his physician to try sea-bathing, but under 
the strictest orders, to take but one plunge into the invigor- 



CHARLES LAMB. IS 



ating element. An excess of tliis, it was added, might be 
fatal. Lamb proceeded to put himself into the hands of the 
bathing-master, who, being in a great hurry, proceeded to 
dispose of his case summarily, "I am — to be — d-d-d-f7^jt)pef?," 
said Lamb. "All right," said the man, and down he went, 
gasping with his desire to tell the whole. " But I'm — to 
be — d-(\.-dip — ," strangled poor Lamb, as he came up, now 
unable from his rage to even extricate the first word. " All 
right, sir ! " assented the man, accommodatingly, and in he 
went more dead than alive. " D-d-d-f/-?}^ " — he came up 
spluttering and choking, almost gone. "All right, sir !" In 
again with a vigorous hand. ^^ Only once!'''' he roared, cast- 
ing off the treacherous words as he came in view of life the last 
time. It is a comfort to know that he did not die from the 
three plunges. Probably his righteous indignation saved him. 

In 1825, after thirty-three years' service at the desk of the 
East India Company, he was released on a pension. "For 
some days," he writes, " I was staggered ; could not com- 
prehend the magnitude of my deliverance. All being holi- 
days, I feel as if I had none, as they do in heaven, where 'tis 
all red-letter days." Then, for the sake of his sister's health, 
he removed to Enfield ; but from its fields he declared he 
could be " abundantly satisfied by the patches of long wav- 
ing grass and the stunted trees that blacken in the old 
cKurch-yard nooks, which you may yet find bordering on 
Thames Street." 

A vacation visit to the "Lakes" in the days when he was 
still a clerk brought forth more enthusiasm from " dead nat- 
ure " than he ever before or after exhibited. " Coleridge 
dwells upon a small hill," he writes, "in a comfortable house 
quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains. We 
got in in the evening, traveling in a po-^t-chaise, in the midst 
of a gorgeous sunshine which transmuted all the mountains 
into colors. We thought we had got into fairy-land. But 
that went off and never came again while we stayed. 



A.«n»' 



14 CHARLES LAMB. 



" We entered Coleridge's corafortaljle study just in the dusk 
when the mountains were^^ali dark with clouds upon tlieir 
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of 
eight before, nor do I suppose that I can ever again. Glori- 
ous creatures, fine old fellows ! I never shall forget ye, how 
ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, 
as it seemed for the night, but promising that you were to 
be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in 
his study, which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an 
old-fashioned organ never played upon, big enough for a 
church, shelves of scattered folios, an ^olian harp, and an 
old sofa, half-bed. And all looking out on the last fading 
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren ; what a 
night ! 

" We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have 
waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied my- 
self that there is such a thing as that which tom-ists call 
romantic. O, its fine black head and the bleak air atop of 
it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making 
you giddy ; and then Scotland afar off, and the border coun- 
tries so famous in song and ballad ! It was a day that will 
stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in ray life. You can- 
not conceive the degradation I felt at first from being accus- 
tomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in 
rivers without beijig controlled by any one, to come home 
and icork. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform 
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased (^od to 
call me. Besides, after all. Fleet Street and the Strand are 
better places to live in for good than amid Skiddaw. I 
could spend a yeai-, two, three years among them, but I must 
have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, 
or I should mope and pine away." 

One of his biographers finds the reason for this fascination 
in the intense humanity of the man. From the hills there 
looked out no human countenance on the gentle and affec- 



CHARLES LAMB. £ 15 



tionate creature, and he could not trust himsel^alone. It 
was the wise instinct of the soul tracing its way back to 
sanity and safety. 

The "Essays of Elia" cannot be compared with any thing 
else in all English literature. Nowhere besides do we find 
such quaintness, such irresistible drolleries, such delicate 
satire. " His words are like those of a man thinking aloud 
— words taken down by a reporter behind the book-shelves 
or the curtains." 

"A Dissertation uj^on Roast Pig" is the most famous and 
original, but is not more entertaining than " The Praise of 
Chimney Sweepers," or "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Be- 
havior of Married People," or "The Old Margate Hoy." 
"The Superannuated Man" is himself, after being liberated 
from the desk. There is none more touching than "Dream 
Children." In it he tells us how, as children love to listen 
to stories about their elders when they were children, so /lis 
little ones came one night thronging about him to hear about 
their great-grandmother and the old house. He tells them, 
too, about their pretty dead mother, and how he courted her 
for seven long years. Soon the faces of the little ones grow 
dim and fade away, and he awakes, finding himself quietly 
seated in his bachelor's arm-chair, Avhere he had fallen asleep. 
It reminds us that the gentle Anna, " the fair-haired maid," 
with whom he wandered through the fields and woods of 
Islington, came often to his memory, while he consoled his 
loneliness with the faces in fire-forms which rose and fell in 
the flickering light of his blazing coals. 

Lamb was the center of a pleasant London circle. To hira 
and his beloved Mary came Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, 
Hood, and many others; and royal evenings they had to- 
gether. Hazlitt has recorded an instance of Lamb's pious 
feelings breaking through his fancies and humors, but which, 
he says, cannot be appreciated except by those who can recall 
to memory the suffused eye and quivering lips with which 



16 CHARLES LAMB. 



he stammered out a reference to the name he woidd not utter. 
" There is only one other person I can ever tliink of after 
this," said Lamb. "If Shakespeare was to come into the 
room, we should all rise to meet him; but if that Person 
were to come into it, we should all fall down and kiss the 
hem of his garment." 

Charles Lamb died in the sixtieth year of his age, after a 
few days' illness. Mary survived him many years, still the 
center of the old circle, until she, too, died and went to take 
up with her brother their last lodging in Edmonton Church- 
yard. 

Then was more fully understood the singular humor and 
lonely disquiet of this man, and how it was that for forty 
years he had walked through the world Avith the dread of 
insanity upon his own nature, and the spectacle of possible 
insanity daily by his side. Homage to the great heart that 
quietly took up and fulfilled its heavy burden of duty ! 

But, while giving him full credit for this, we cannot for- 
get that he indulged the appetite for strong drink. He did 
not excuse the habit ; he fought against it. He conquered 
the pipe, but the bottle he could not conquer. Heroic as he 
was in many things he was vanquished here. Let the young 
take his sad story to heart, and in early life acquire the 
habit of total abstinence. 



o xa: .^^ :e=l xj E s Hi^^nvtiB. 

[tiiougiit-outline to help the .memout.] 

1. Pliiee and time of birth ? Seliooliii early life? Employed by East India 

Company '*. 
2 Intimacy with Coleridge ? Maryljamb? Southey ? Name of " Elia ? " 
li. Talfourd's description of Lamb? When pensioned by East India Company ? 

His writinii-s ? His death i His heroism ? 



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